D. Trotz Behind the Banner of Culture? Gender, Race, and the Family in Guyana
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D. Trotz Behind the banner of culture? Gender, race, and the family in Guyana In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 77 (2003), no: 1/2, Leiden, 5-29 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:49:45PM via free access D. ALISSA TROTZ BEHIND THE BANNER OF CULTURE? GENDER, "RACE," AND THE FAMILY IN GUYANA INTRODUCTION This article is a conceptual-historical effort to show the relevance, indeed centrality, of the family to representations of gendered and racialized dif- ference in the Caribbean.1 While it addresses itself to broader postcolonial feminist and Caribbeanist debates and concerns, it specifically grounds this analytical terrain in Guyana, a country where the racialization of the political process - between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese - is today deeply embedded in the country's coastal fabric. Most scholarly and popular writings locate the historical "origins" of the conflict between these two groups (a conflict that reduces the country to its coastal limits and marginalizes all racialized "others" and in particular the indigenous, Amerindian populations) to the formal divisions of labor in a colonial plantation economy. I hope to contribute to, and extend, this discussion by showing why and how family comes to matter in the production of racialized differences, and what its consequences are for women.2 1. A much earlier version of the historical section of this paper was presented at the Conference on Slavery and the Atlantic World, Tulane University, New Orleans, 1996. I am grateful to Betty Wood and Sylvia Frey for encouraging me to reflect on these historical questions, and to Prabhu Mohapatra, whose historical work on British Guiana in large part inspired this essay. Andaiye, Kamala Kempadoo, Anne Macpherson, Michelle Murphy, Linda Peake, and the journal reviewers have generously shared their time, comments, and work with me. Thanks especially to Nigel Bolland for pushing me beyond the limits of the Anglophone Caribbean. 2. This essay is part of a broader study of contemporary representations of racialized differences among Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, the way such differences become reduced to culture, and the effects on women of such discourses. The discussion started here is intended to indicate some of the conceptual and historical points of departure for that project. New West Indian Guide I Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 77 no.l &2 (2003):5-29 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:49:45PM via free access 6 D. ALISSA TROTZ I argue that we need to take the family seriously for — at least - two reasons. The first has to do with the terms upon which claims to racialized difference are made. Brackette Williams (1991) demonstrates how the politics of cultural struggle in postcolonial Guyana are partly shaped historically by the "conflation of race, class, and culture" in the production of difference. In this essay, I want to consider how gender figures into colonial constructions of stratified difference, and particularly how ideas of family and kinship become intimately implicated in the production of otherness. Discussions of domesticity are crucial to mapping how differences called cultures are made and imagined to be made in familial (these supposedly intimate) spaces, and the ways in which women come to stand for such differences (Yuval-Davis & Anthias 1989; Loomba 1998). This article is concerned with exploring how dimensions of Caribbean scholarship relating to the family might be fruitfully apprehended and extended to engage these issues. This brings us to the second reason for taking the family seriously. Mindie Lazarus-Black (1994:66 n. 25) points out that what is needed is an analysis of the idea of the family in the Caribbean, its ideological history. And Raymond T. Smith (1996) notes that the perception of ethnic differences as stable and always discernible in the same way has an academie history. As this paper will show, ideas about the family are intimately connected to ideas about "ethnic"/ "cultural" differences, and the images of different families bequeathed to us by much of the early and some of the later social science literature have helped in no small way to naturalize this connection. In this respect, what is at stake is a reckoning of our accountability as academies and policymakers. To what extent have notions of the family in the Caribbean rehearsed colonial constructions of women's place, and of cultural differences? How might we fashion research agendas that willfully escape repeating the enduring legacy of our colonial pasts? • The first section of this essay revisits the early scholarly (predominantly sociological and anthropological) output on "the Caribbean family," focusing on its bounded and ethnocentric conception of domesticity. It then moves on to consider feminist and other critical scholarship that challenged these earlier representations and that asks us to rethink the family in contexts that crisscross the domestic, the local, the national. This work, I suggest, is crucial to our understanding of the ways in which the family produces both affiliation and difference and of the role played by gender in such productions. The remainder of the paper returns to Guyana by way of example: in the final section I historicize the discussion by looking primarily at the shifting representations of the indentured and ex-indentured Indian community to show how the family comes to be domesticated and to be seen as an origin site of cultural difference as expressed through racialized differences among women. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:49:45PM via free access GENDER, "RACE," AND THE FAMILY IN GUYANA 7 REPRESENTING THE CARIBBEAN FAMILY Between the 1950s and the early 1970s, Caribbean women appeared in the academie literature primarily within the context of households and families. The bulk of the research concentrated on accounting for the fact that kinship structures in the region tended to depart from the Western nuclear family pattern. Differences between Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans were also established through separate ethnographic accounts, all of which generally agreed on the "facts" at hand. Consensual and nonresidential (visiting) relationships were prevalent among black women, while Indian women tended to enter into earlier, and often arranged, marriages. Afro- Caribbean households were more likely to be headed by a woman. Finally, whereas Indo-Caribbean households appeared to follow a more "typical" pattern premised on the authority of the male head, domestic relations among Afro-Caribbeans tended to revolve around women in their role as mothers. Although the main features of familial life in the Caribbean were not disputed, there were numerous interpretations: were these survivals from Africa and India; were the "different" family types part of a single stratification system or did they fit into a plural society model of non- overlapping segments, each with its own internal evaluative system; were we simply witnessing the adaptation of family forms, particularly among the poor, to the exigencies of everyday life?3 While the various explanations may have differed in their reasons for the diversity of Caribbean familial life, they shared a common assumption that the domestic sphere was a naturally occurring and irrevocably feminine domain. Thus the bulk of this early work provides us with very little information on women outside their domestic roles (but see Cumper 1956). This was especially obvious in the reputation-respectability paradigm developed by Peter Wilson (1969), which argued that women were the repositories of Eurocentric respectability, manifested through their involvement in the churches, their emphasis on sexual propriety and marriage, and their identification with the household. In contrast, via their participation in male- dominated and public social networks, men attained prominence as part of an alternative value system that expressed an indigenous and oppositional counterculture. To be sure, one should not underestimate the pervasiveness of discourses of respectability in the Caribbean today - although it could be argued that Wilson did not adequately consider how such discourses would also enable the constitution of gendered, classed, and racialized differences.4 3. For a general overview of these various theoretical positions see Barrow 1996. 4. For an excellent critique of Wilson see Yelvington 1995:163-85. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:49:45PM via free access 8 D. ALISSA TROTZ The point is rather to make explicit the power relations through which such elaborations of meaning are made possible, as well as to recognize that they simply do not capture the myriad domains where women are to be found. The starting point for researchers and policymakers alike, more explicit in some cases than in others, was that "normal" households necessarily con- sisted of a husband, wife, and children: Raymond Smith's early work (1956: 69) posited, for example, that "household groups come into being when a man and a woman enter a conjugal union and set up home together." The pervasive assumption of compulsory heterosexuality undergirding Caribbean kinship studies has, until fairly recently, resulted in overwhelming silence in the scholarship regarding sexual practices and relationships that did not conform to the dominant model (Alexander 1997; Wekker 1997; Kempadoo 2002). Moreover, this emphasis on the nuclear family was based on the impo- sition of external criteria